The Embarrassing Old Men Of Atheism

I wrote a while back about how some of the atheists had conflated civility and "safety", i.e. ideological conformity; apparently the shunning has begun in earnest, now that "there's an excellent chance that the top of your head came off" when thinking about the awful, sexist, racist, every other -ist Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Already, they're casting the wrongthinkers out of the tent:

Thirdly (and you knew I would get to this) there are conflicts within the atheist movement. We often neglect to assume best intentions, which is a strategy necessary for healthy collaboration. But assuming best intentions with our fellow atheists is a challenge when there is a small cadre of atheists whose intentions are not kind or respectful but threatening and abusive, specifically towards women who identify and criticize sexism. There are also a substantial number of community members, many of whom I call friends, who don't always differentiate that cadre's hateful and violent speech from respectful disagreement. This has led to a ever-widening chasm between the "let's all get along" folk and a number of prominent atheist feminists.

The hateful cadre? They can go to nonexistent hell. No one who makes any kind of threat belongs in the atheist community. The rest of us would benefit from figuring out how to work together. That would require the "let's all get along" folk to stop referring to threats and hate speech as "disagreement." And it would require us feminists to be very careful ourselves about not mistaking disagreement or ignorance for unforgivable bigotry. As Bernice Johnson Reagon said, "a coalition is not a home"; we should not need to agree or even feel comfortable with each other to work together.

Except, of course, when they should. Just as a reminder, one of the many things that set off the prior round of atheist exorcism was Dawkins retweeting a woman questioning the existence of sexism within atheist groups (and positing a reason why so many do find it):

I'm a woman & an atheist blogger, & never experienced sexist abuse from fellow atheists. Maybe because I don't assume they're misogynists?

— Lucy Wainwright (@Whoozley) August 27, 2012

 Well, of course, burn the witch, &c. I don't doubt Dawkins can be pugilistic; it seems a fairly defining feature of modern atheistic discourse. But the insane equivalence of legitimate disagreement with "hate speech" shows just how petty and juvenile the movement has become.

Alexandra Petri And The No Good, Very Bad Meetings

You may have seen Alexandra Petri's Washington Post essay, "Famous quotes, the way a woman would have to say them during a meeting". A number of female friends circulated it in social media (Facebook, mostly); what seems to have grabbed them is the shared experience of abasement, i.e. the words "I'm sorry" appear frequently, and as well, denigrating one's own contributions. While I don't deny that experience (and see "The Confidence Gap" for a likely explanation), having sat through a number of meetings myself with women, this is not my recollection of their dynamics. Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist has a good rejoinder to all this, in three parts, the strongest being:

Meetings are awful not because men are sexist or women can’t form coherent thoughts but because meetings are awful! Nobody likes them. People have trouble getting along in groups, and communication is difficult.

Well, yes, this. The shilly-shallying language of Petri's essay ("I’m sorry, I just had this idea — it’s probably crazy, but — look, just as long as we’re throwing things out here — I had sort of an idea or vision about maybe the future?") is just damned annoying; Hemingway reminds us there are women who can utter a coherent sentence without backing up into apologetics.

The New York Times' Really Stupid, Really Predictable Essay On Tech Diversity

I expect it would shock absolutely no one to learn that the New York Times is in the bag with the rest of the tech industry press in pearl-clutching about the lack of women in STEM careers, while stumping for the same old dogmatic causes. This stuff is going to be with us a long while, I expect, so might as well get used to "What Really Keeps Women Out Of Tech": you see, it's just too darn male:

Over and over, Dr. Cheryan and her colleagues have found that female students are more interested in enrolling in a computer class if they are shown a classroom (whether virtual or real) decorated not with “Star Wars” posters, science-fiction books, computer parts and tech magazines, but with a more neutral décor — art and nature posters, coffee makers, plants and general-interest magazines.

It's all the movies' fault:

The percentage of women studying computer science actually has fallen since the 1980s. Dr. Cheryan theorizes that this decline might be partly attributable to the rise of pop-culture portrayals of scientists as white or Asian male geeks in movies and TV shows like “Revenge of the Nerds” and “The Big Bang Theory.” The media’s intense focus on start-up culture and male geniuses such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates might also have inspired more young men than women to enter the field.

It's almost as if just being around nerdy men is enough to frighten these delicate flowers away from the field!

... I wonder how many young men would choose to major in computer science if they suspected they might need to carry out their coding while sitting in a pink cubicle decorated with posters of “Sex and the City,” with copies of Vogue and Cosmo scattered around the lunchroom. In fact, Dr. Cheryan’s research shows that young men tend not to major in English for the same reasons women don’t pick computer science: They compare their notions of who they are to their stereotypes of English majors and decide they won’t fit in.

Since I can't find Dr. Cheryan's supporting paper on the subject, it's hard to know how good it is, i.e. do they actually ask men why they chose the major they did? A more realistic version of events, one that covers virtually every good coder I know, is that

1. They actually like the work itself (the act of writing software, e.g., is an intrinsic reward), and
2. The pay is pretty good compared to other jobs. (Which, by the way, chicks dig men with a stable job and good pay. Just so's you know.)

What I do not get, time and time again, is why so many people have such determination to force people who show no inclination or ability into fields where they will ultimately be uncomfortable at best. I have no problem at all with women being in STEM fields, and know many. But to look at the relative paucity of women and declare this is a problem is utter nonsense. This is something we should probably expect from a professor of creative writing at the University of Michigan, one who apparently has a chip on her shoulder for her career not turning out the way she wanted it to. Her book on the subject, The Only Woman In The Room, is "frankly personal and ... reflects on women’s experiences in a way that simple data can’t" — i.e., like all feminist screeds, it is anti-empirical. That is a deeply wrong approach for someone claiming to be a scientist.

Sealioning, Defined

I touched on the subject of "sealioning" a while back, but I wanted to post something brief to capture a handful of links on this deeply disingenuous trope. Know Your Meme expressly credits the first published use of this term to David Malki's Wondermark, but Robot Hugs basically limned the outlines of the same idea earlier without using that exact locution.

The idea seems to be "we're having a private conversation here, so go away, man". The same thing occurs in the more recent Wondermark strip:

Notice the confusion of public online space (e.g., Facebook, or even more so, Twitter) with a private space (someone's dining room, say, from the Wondermark panel). These two things are entirely different environments with different characteristics, which is why the entire "sealioning" trope is so mendacious. What it really means is that the person employing this wants their opposite to just shut up because, reasons. It is a marker for someone (say, a radical feminist) spouting unsupported, dogmatic, negative opinions (patriarchy!) about some group (say, men) in an online space where members of that group are likely to be and will take exception and loudly disagree. Luckily, Urban Dictionary has a knockout, accurate, take-no-prisoners definition:

To express disagreement with, express skepticism of, or otherwise simply talk back to an internet social justice advocate or internet radical feminist.

Help me! help me! These white male shitlords on the internet are sealioning me by asking me to provide evidence for my accusations! I'm being harassed and stalked because people doubt me! Please donate to my paetron and kickstarter accounts so I can buy some new shoes~whoops, I mean, so I can produce some more content about how sexist this hobby that I don't really partake in is.

Ayup.

What Courage Looks Like

Meet Clare Hollingworth, who broke the story of World War II:

After elbowing her way into an industry in which she had few connections and little experience, she landed a job as a journalist for the Daily Telegraph. But determined to prove her capabilities and worth, Hollingworth persuaded her editor to send her to Poland to report on the build-up to war in August 1939.

In the city of Gleiwitz, on the Polish border, she spotted something unusual: hundreds of German tanks lined up, passing through a valley. She stood in front of what appeared to be Germany invading Poland, with the tanks waiting for the whistle blow that would order advance. Hollingworth ran to a nearby building and picked up the phone to call her friend Robin Hankey, who worked at the British Embassy.

“Robin,” she said. “The war’s begun!”

Hankey dismissed her claim. It couldn’t be true, he insisted, as the governments were still in negotiations. To prove she was telling the truth, Hollingworth stuck the phone out of the window so he could hear the tanks moving past. Convinced, he swiftly alerted authorities, who then had the unusual task of telling the Polish government that their country was about to be invaded.

Hollingworth had just alerted the world that World War II had started.

She had an amazing long career:

Here is a short highlights reel of Hollingworth’s incredible career: She was accused of being an MI6 spy by the Polish secret police; became one of the first western correspondents to be accredited in China after the cultural revolution; she covered the Desert War in North Africa, civil wars in Algeria and Aden, and the India-Pakistan wars; she broke the story of the disappearance and defection of Kim Philby to the Soviet Union; she single-handedly secured the release of kidnapped Daily Telegraph journalist John Wallis by insisting to the hostage takers that she and a group of other reporters were coming to be taken prisoner too.

The bell hooks brand of feminism, the one most often on display anymore, magnifies every conceivable slight into a legal tort, and blames men for all female failings, while demanding nothing of its proponents. For those of us opposed to this calumny, it's vital we look for women who have lived exceptional lives and put them and their work center stage from time to time, as role models. Hollingworth is worthy.

Physician, Heal Thyself: TechCrunch's "Diversity" Hypocrisy

So, this happened:

Here’s the breakdown of gender and racial diversity of venture firms http://t.co/P9TmmdYH8o pic.twitter.com/suoMBznbRD

— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) October 7, 2015

So, um, let's check out the diversity of the staff at TechCrunch:

Writer Sex Ethnicity Matthew Panzarino Male White Matt Burns Male White Alex Wilhelm Male White Anna Escher Female White Anthony Ha Male Asian Bryce Durbin Male White Catherine Shu Female Asian Chris Nesi Male White Connie Loizos Female White Drew Olanoff Male White Felicia Williams Female White Frederic Lardinois Male White Greg Kumparak Male White Henry Pickavet Male White JaNelle Hasty Female Black Ingrid Lunden Female White Joey Hinson Male White John Biggs Male White Jon Russell Male White Jonathan Shieber Male White Jordan Crook Female White Jesse Chambers Male White

Writer Sex Ethnicity Josh Constine Male White Kim-Mai Cutler Female Asian Leslie Hitchcock Female White Matthew Lynley Male White Megan Rose Dickey Female Black Mike Butcher Male White Natasha Lomas Female White Ned Desmond Male White Nicholas Vincent Male White Nicole Wilke Female White Romain Dillet Male White Sam O'Keefe Female White Sarah Buhr Female White Sarah Lane Female White Sarah Perez Female Hispanic Stephen Wood Male White Steve Long Male White Steve O'Hear Male White Tito Hamze Male White Travis Bernard Male White Yashad Kulkarni Male Arabic?

In graphical form:

Oh, dear, overwhelmingly male (64%) and/or white (83%), which latter is worse than the "senior investment team" they decry on racial grounds. I don't expect this will end TechCrunch's apparently limitless belief they should be able to shove their nose into other people's companies, but it does serve to illustrate what a raging bunch of hypocrites they are.

Update: If we look at bylines, the numbers are, well, interesting:

Men are still the dominant writers at TechCrunch (73% of bylines), and whites are even more so (83% of bylines). Yeah, whatever, TechCrunch.

The Male Putdown Style Bags A Coder

Via Slashdot, a fairly prominent example of something I was writing about the other day in a more general context, the centrality of the male putdown as a way to remind everyone that respect is in limited supply. One of its freer users is Linus Torvalds, whose kernel development lists are widely known as flamefests. Developer Sarah Sharp recently announced she would step down in a blog post, citing a toxic communication style as the fundamental reason:

I have the utmost respect for the technical efforts of the Linux kernel community. They have scaled and grown a project that is focused on maintaining some of the highest coding standards out there. The focus on technical excellence, in combination with overloaded maintainers, and people with different cultural and social norms, means that Linux kernel maintainers are often blunt, rude, or brutal to get their job done. Top Linux kernel developers often yell at each other in order to correct each other’s behavior.

That’s not a communication style that works for me. I need communication that is technically brutal but personally respectful. I need people to correct my behavior when I’m doing something wrong (either technically or socially) without tearing me down as a person. We are human. We make mistakes, and we correct them. We get frustrated with someone, we over-react, and then we apologize and try to work together towards a solution.

Sharp tried and failed to get a policy of greater civility instituted on the kernel mailing list. Torvalds, of course, rejected it vociferously (as he does), citing a need for clarity by electronic communications as the justification:

The fact is, people need to know what my position on things are. And I can't just say "please don't do that", because people won't listen. I say "On the internet, nobody can hear you being subtle", and I mean it.

And I definitely am not willing to string people along, either. I've had that happen too - not telling people clearly enough that I don't like their approach, they go on to re-architect something, and get really upset when I am then not willing to take their work.

I'm generally a fan of civility; it's unfortunate that Sharp quit over this, but in a volunteer project, nobody makes you work. Given it's Linus' name on the project, he gets to call the shots.